Status, issues and challenges with FAIRness of seismological waveform data and beyond

Driven by the scientific need for global exchange of data to study earthquakes and related phenomena, community standards and best practices have evolved in seismology for decades. These developments are largely driven by operational and scientific requirements coming directly from the community of academic research and seismological monitoring, and have resulted in standardised data formats, data models and services for data access and exchange.

Initial developments, promotion and further evolution of these standards are coordinated mainly within the International Federation of Digital Seismic Networks (FDSN, https://fdsn.org), a commission of IASPEI (International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior, httwww.iaspei.org) that is one of eight associations of the IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, https://iugg.org).   

With the introduction of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles in 2016 and the subsequent appearance of FAIR assessment methods and tools it became clear that these seismological community standards only cover parts of the FAIR principles. Interoperability remains challenging, for example, due to the lack of community standardised FAIR vocabularies, and the lack of a harmonised and consistently applied data license policy impacts Reproducibility.

The emergence of new data types and the drastic increase in data volumes due to new measurement techniques require updates and evolution of the existing community standards, highlighting another general challenge:  Who are the recognised and appropriate governance bodies for curation and further development of 'relevant community standards' (as required by the FAIR principles)?

In this presentation we describe the current status of FAIRness for seismological waveform data and beyond, also looking towards seismology in general, geodesy and some other fields of geophysics. Based on our assessment of current challenges we discuss open questions and possible ways forward. We look at FAIR-relevant development and governance of standards, the potential role of existing international organisations like FDSN, IASPEI and IUGG, and the possibility and need to coordinate across domains for harmonisation as well as demarcation.